In short, you usually get where you want to go.
Take a simple point-to-point transfer, like the Hauraki run. In that case there is no real disadvantage in using automatic syntax generators. But for longer trajectories - those that may involve six or seven transits between aperture hubs - machines lose the edge. They find a solution, but usually it isn't the optimum one. That's where syntax runners come in. People like Suzy have an intuitive grasp of syntax solutions. They dream in runes. When they see a poorly constructed script, they feel it like toothache. It
affronts
them.
A good syntax runner can shave days off a route. For a company like Ashanti Industrial, that can make a lot of difference.
But I wasn't a syntax runner. I could tell when something had gone wrong with the platelets, but I had to trust that Suzy had done her job. I had no other choice.
But I knew Suzy wouldn't screw things up.
I twisted around and looked back the other way. Now that we were in space, the q-planes had deployed. They were swung out from the hull on triple hundred-metre-long jibs, like the arms of a grapple. I checked that they were locked in their fully extended positions and that the status lights were all in the green. The jibs were Ray's area. He'd been checking the alignment of the ski-shaped q-planes when I ordered him to close up ship and prepare to lift. I couldn't see any visible indication that they were out of alignment, but then again it wouldn't take much to make our trip home bumpier than usual. But as I'd told Ray, who cared? The
Blue Goose
could take a little tunnel turbulence. It was built to.
I checked the surge point again. Only three ships ahead of us.
I went back to the surge tanks and checked that Suzy and Ray were all right. Ray's tank had been customised at the same time that Suzy had had hers done. It was covered with images of what Suzy called the BVM: the Blessed Virgin Mary. The BVM was always in a spacesuit, carrying a little spacesuited Jesus. Their helmets were airbrushed gold halos. The artwork had a cheap, hasty look to it. I assumed Ray hadn't spent as much as Suzy.
Quickly I stripped down to my underclothes. I plumbed into my own unpainted surge tank and closed the lid. The buffering gel sloshed in. Within about twenty seconds I was already feeling drowsy. By the time traffic control gave us the green light I'd be asleep.
I've done it a thousand times. There was no fear, no apprehension. Just a tiny flicker of regret.
I've never seen an aperture. Then again, very few people have.
Witnesses report a doughnut-shaped lump of dark chondrite asteroid, about two kilometres across. The entire middle section has been cored out, with the inner part of the ring faced by the quixotic-matter machinery of the aperture itself. They say the q-matter machinery twinkles and moves all the while, like the ticking innards of a very complicated clock. But the monitoring systems of the Aperture Authority detect no movement at all.
It's alien technology. We have no idea how it works, or even who made it. Maybe, in hindsight, it's better not to be able to see it.
It's enough to dream, and then awake, and know that you're somewhere else.
Try a different approach, Greta says. Tell her the truth this time. Maybe she'll take it easier than you think.
'There's no way I can tell her the truth.'
Greta leans one hip against the wall, one hand still in her pocket. 'Then tell her something halfway truthful.'
We un-plumb Suzy and haul her out of the surge tank.
'Where are we?' she asks. Then to Greta: 'Who are you?'
I wonder if some of the last conversation did make it out of Suzy's short-term memory after all.
'Greta works here,' I say.
'Where's here?'
I remember what Greta told me. 'A station in Schedar Sector.'
'That's not where we're meant to be, Thom.'
I nod. 'I know. There was a mistake. A routing error.'
Suzy's already shaking her head. 'There was nothing wrong--'
'I know. It wasn't your fault.' I help her into her ship clothes. She's still shivering, her muscles reacting to movement after so much time in the tank. 'The syntax was good.'
'Then what?'
'The system made a mistake, not you.'
'Schedar sector ...' Suzy says. 'That would put us about ten days off our schedule, wouldn't it?'
I try and remember what Greta said to me the first time. I ought to know this stuff by heart, but Suzy's the routing expert, not me. 'That sounds about right,' I say.
But Suzy shakes her head. 'Then we're not in Schedar Sector.'
I try to sound pleasantly surprised.
'We're not?'
'I've been in that tank for a lot longer than a few days, Thom. I know. I can feel it in every fucking bone in my body. So where are we?'
I turn to Greta. I can't believe this is happening again.
'End it,' I say.
Greta steps towards Suzy.
You know that 'as soon as I awoke I knew everything was wrong' cliche'? You've probably heard it a thousand times, in a thousand bars across the Bubble, wherever ship crews swap tall tales over flat, company-subsidised beer. The trouble is that sometimes that's exactly the way it happens. I never felt good after a period in the surge tank. But the only time I had ever come around feeling anywhere near this bad was after that trip I took to the edge of the Bubble.
Mulling this, but knowing there was nothing I could do about it until I was out of the tank, it took me half an hour of painful work to free myself from the connections. Every muscle fibre in my body felt like it had been shredded. Unfortunately, the sense of wrongness didn't end with the tank. The
Blue Goose
was much too quiet. We should have been heading away from the last exit aperture after our routing. But the distant, comforting rumble of the fusion engines wasn't there at all. That meant we were in free-fall.
Not good.
I floated out of the tank, grabbed a handhold and levered myself around to view the other two tanks. Ray's largest BVM stared back radiantly from the cowl of his tank. The bio indices were all in the green. Ray was still unconscious, but there was nothing wrong with him. Same story with Suzy. Some automated system had decided I was the only one who needed waking.
A few minutes later I had made my way to the same observation blister I'd used to check the ship before the surge. I pushed my head into the scuffed glass half-dome and looked around.
We'd arrived somewhere. The
Blue Goose
was sitting in a huge, zero-gravity parking bay. The chamber was an elongated cylinder, hexagonal in cross section. The walls were a smear of service machinery: squat modules, snaking umbilical lines, the retracted cradles of unused docking berths. Whichever way I looked I saw other ships locked onto cradles. Every make and class you could think of, every possible configuration of hull design compatible with aperture transitions. Service lights threw a warm golden glow on the scene. Now and then the whole chamber was bathed in the stuttering violet flicker of a cutting torch.
It was a repair facility.
I was just starting to mull on that when I saw something extend itself from the wall of the chamber. It was a telescopic docking tunnel, groping towards our ship. Through the windows in the side of the tunnel I saw figures floating, pulling themselves along hand over hand.
I sighed and started making my way to the airlock.
By the time I reached the lock they were already through the first stage of the cycle. Nothing wrong with that - there was no good reason to prevent foreign parties boarding a vessel - but it
was
just a tiny bit impolite. But perhaps they'd assumed we were all asleep.
The door slid open.
'You're awake,' a man said. 'Captain Thomas Gundlupet of the
Blue Goose
, isn't it?'
'Guess so,' I said.
'Mind if we come in?'
There were about half a dozen of them, and they were already coming in. They all wore slightly timeworn ochre overalls, flashed with too many company sigils. My hackles rose. I didn't really like the way they were barging in.
'What's up?' I said. 'Where are we?'
'Where do you think?' the man said. He had a face full of stubble, with bad yellow teeth. I was impressed by that. Having bad teeth took a lot of work these days. It was years since I'd seen anyone who had the same dedication to the art.
'I'm really hoping you're not going to tell me we're still stuck in Arkangel System,' I said.
'No, you made it through the gate.'
'And?'
'There was a screw-up. Routing error. You didn't pop out of the right aperture.'
'Oh, Christ.' I took off my bib cap. 'It never rains. Something went wrong with the insertion, right?'
'Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows how these things happen? All we know is you aren't supposed to be here.'
'Right. And where is "here"?'
'Saumlaki Station. Schedar Sector.'
He said it as though he was already losing interest, as if this was a routine he went through several times a day.
He might have been losing interest. I wasn't.
I'd never heard of Saumlaki Station, but I'd certainly heard of Schedar Sector. Schedar was a K supergiant out towards the edge of the Local Bubble. It defined one of the seventy-odd navigational sectors across the whole Bubble.
Did I mention the Bubble already?
You know how the Milky Way Galaxy looks; you've seen it a thousand times, in paintings and computer simulations. A bright central bulge at the galactic core, with lazily curved spiral arms flung out from that hub, each arm composed of hundreds of billions of stars, ranging from the dimmest, slow-burning dwarfs to the hottest supergiants teetering on the edge of supernova extinction.
Now zoom in on one arm of the Milky Way. There's the sun, orange-yellow, about two-thirds out from the centre of the galaxy. Lanes and folds of dust swaddle the sun out to distances of tens of thousands of light-years. Yet the sun itself is sitting right in the middle of a four-hundred-light-year-wide hole in the dust, a bubble in which the density is about a twentieth of its average value.
That's the Local Bubble. It's as if God blew a hole in the dust just for us.
Except, of course, it wasn't God. It was a supernova, about a million years ago.
Look further out, and there are more bubbles, their walls intersecting and merging, forming a vast froth-like structure tens of thousands of light-years across. There are the structures of Loop I and Loop II and the Lindblad Ring. There are even superdense knots where the dust is almost too thick to be seen through at all. Black cauls like the Taurus or Rho-Ophiuchi Dark Clouds, or the Aquila Rift itself.
Lying outside the Local Bubble, the Rift is the furthest point in the galaxy we've ever travelled to. It's not a question of endurance or nerve. There simply isn't a way to get beyond it, at least not within the faster-than-light network of the aperture links. The rabbit-warren of possible routes just doesn't reach any further. Most destinations - including most of those on the
Blue Goose
's itinerary - didn't even get you beyond the Local Bubble.
For us, it didn't matter. There's still a lot of commerce you can do within a hundred light-years of Earth. But Schedar was right on the periphery of the Bubble, where dust density began to ramp up to normal galactic levels, two hundred and twenty-eight light-years from Mother Earth.
Again: not good.
'I know this is a shock for you,' another voice said. 'But it's not as bad as you think it is.'
I looked at the woman who had just spoken. Medium height, the kind of face they called 'elfin', with slanted, ash-grey eyes and a bob of shoulder-length, chrome-white hair.
The face was achingly familiar.
'It isn't?'
'I wouldn't say so, Thom.' She smiled. 'After all, it's given us the chance to catch up on old times, hasn't it?'
'Greta?' I asked, disbelievingly.
She nodded. 'For my sins.'
'My God. It is you, isn't it?'
'I wasn't sure you'd recognise me. Especially after all this time.'
'You didn't have much trouble recognising me.'
'I didn't have to. The moment you popped out we picked up your recovery transponder. Told us the name of your ship, who owned her, who was flying it, what you were carrying, where you were supposed to be headed. When I heard it was you, I made sure I was part of the reception team. But don't worry. It's not like you've changed all that much.'